The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
October 14, 2007
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: Luke 17:11-19
On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between
Sermon:
You
may have seen the news story last week. This was the latest in a series of acts
of vandalism and thefts at cultural sites in
She
was understandably outraged in her comments to the press.
The break-in was “an attack against our memory and our heritage,” Ms.
Albanel told French radio France Info.
But part of what shocked people was that this seems to be trend, a
spate of attacks in
But this break-in that resulted in the four inch rip in the Monet
painting, happened during a yearly all-night festival of arts and music, the
White Night, when thousands of people pour into the streets. Spirits were
running particularly high that Saturday in
So five drunken partiers, burst into the museum for laughs, and one of
them puts a fist through a priceless and irreplaceable Monet painting over a
hundred years old. What struck me when I heard this was: how ungrateful. To be in the presence of something
wonderful like that, and think, in a moment of revelry, I’ll put my fist
through it. How ungrateful.
Last year, when I was at a meeting at the United Church of Christ in
There were six or seven of each of his famous scenes, the foggy bridges
in London, the rocky arch formations on the sea, all those haystacks, each with
just a slightly different cast of light to bring out the violet, the gold and
the green. And then there were the water lilies. So many of those you just
couldn’t take them in.
I am used to visiting a museum and seeing a few Monet’s, and often,
because I love them, that will be my first and favorite stop, the place where I
will linger the longest.
But in that exhibit of only Monet you felt like you were drowning in
beauty. There was so much of it, you almost stopped being able to take it in.
And I reached my limit. You see, while I love museums, I can not stay
in one for longer than one hour. It’s sad, because I am a grown up, but that’s
my limit. So there I was with a once in a lifetime opportunity to see all those
Monet’s and at minute 59, my mind started wandering to what I would eat for
dinner.
At that time, I wondered, with someone like Monet, could there be too
much of a good thing? But I couldn’t take any more of it it. And I had that
same thought again, this time about myself. How ungrateful.
The drunken partiers in
But I, when surrounded by so much beautiful art, so many Monets, was
also ungrateful. There was no way I could give all those paintings the love and
gratitude they deserved.
But last week when I heard about the vandals in
Because ingratitude is funny that way. It is always more obvious in
other people than it is to ourselves. It’s easy to spot someone else being
ungrateful; harder to see it in ourselves.
In the gospel story this morning, we know who the hero is. It’s the one
leper who came back to say thank you. I mean, this is not a mysterious parable.
Really, it’s so much of a no-brainer we wonder why we even need to hear it.
There are ten people suffering with leprosy, a disease in which you can
lose your arms and your legs, a contagious condition that sentenced the
sufferer to live in exile and wander the world in company of other lepers. It’s
the worst kind of ordeal. And somehow Jesus delivers them from it. Nine of them
head off to the temple, but one, the Samaritan, heads back to thank Jesus. He’s
the good guy of the story. The other nine are ungrateful. So much so, the story
doesn’t even strike us as realistic. How would you not say thank you?
And we could stop right there, knowing who we would be in the story.
We’d be the one who goes back and says thank you. The other nine are idiots. Or
at worst, ungrateful. After all, ingratitude is always so much more noticeable
in other people than in ourselves.
But let’s explore this a little more deeply, shall we? What was going
on with the nine people who for some reason did not say thank you? Were they
really just insensitive idiots?
Who were they anyway? Well, we know that they were Jewish, like Jesus.
This story takes place in between Galilee, a Jewish village, and
So the nine Jews, upon being healed, returned to their roots. They
rushed off to the temple. There, presumably they would show gratitude to God in
worship, but they were also going to the temple to get checked out. They needed
to show that they were disease free before they would be allowed back into
society. And after that, I am guessing that their next stop was their friends
and their families.
But first they went to the temple.
So they actually were doing what they were meant to do.
It’s easy to look at those nine and say: how ungrateful. But I doubt
they were. People have all sorts of reasons for not saying thank you. One of
them is not knowing the right person to thank.
You see, this healing story is pretty chaotic, and pretty unclear in
the concrete details of cause and effect. Here, Jesus didn’t touch the sick
people, as he does in other healing stories. It’s more like they called out to
him, and he responded with a word, saying, ‘Go and show yourselves to the
priests.’ and then as they did what he said to do, along the way, they were
healed. So I think it’s possible they may not have even known Jesus was the one
who cured them. After all, they were a band of beggars. They spent all day
calling out to people for help. Suddenly they were well. Who knows where that
came from? But they rushed back to their roots, to their temple, and I’m
guessing they gave thanks to God.
But the Samaritan said thank you. Why? Because he was perfect? No, I
think he’s pretty human and fallible too. But his circumstances were
different.
You see, the Samaritan didn’t care about going to the Jewish temple. He
was not in his own territory, his family and friends were not right there
around the corner, but were in
Because of that, he may have been more open to the real details of the
experience. And so as the other nine rush off, he turns back, realizes it was
Jesus who healed him, and gives him thanks. Is he by nature a more grateful
person? I doubt it. I think he just didn’t have anything else tempting him away
from the moment. His circumstances, as hard as they were, allowed him to see
something the other nine missed, and so we remember him as the hero, but really
this is not a story about heroes.
I think this is ultimately a story about humility. A reminder of how
easy it is for we human beings to get it wrong.
And if all we take from this story is that we should be like the tenth
person who says thank you, we may miss the more complicated point, which is
that we are more likely to be one of the nine. You could even deduce from the
evidence a statistic, if your mind works that way. That human beings are nine times out of ten
going to miss the opportunity to say thank you.
One thing I love about this little tale is how spare it is. There are
very few details provided, and so much left out. Enough left out, so that it
can become not a story about them, but about us. We can read ourselves into it.
But one detail that is provided is this about the Samaritan. It says,
“Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back,” I love that
phrase “turned back.” Because it seems to imply he too had forgotten for a
moment about Jesus. Even the samaritan had gone along his way a bit before it
hit him. So it had been a while. And he couldn’t just turn around to thank
Jesus. He had to turn back, perhaps even walk a while. So he wasn’t
perfect. He was just willing to correct
his mistake.
It’s easy to accuse other people of being ungrateful. Much harder to
know when we’ve been ungrateful ourselves. Because most of us don’t mean to be
ungrateful. We just get caught up in other things. The beauty of gratitude is
that it doesn’t have a time limit. You can always turn back. It’s never too
late to remember to say thank you.
Jesus was not the only person to seek to heal
the lepers. The famous Albert Schweitzer made his name as a theologian and
scholar, publishing in 1906 The Quest
of the Historical Jesus, a book that launched him in fame. But he
was also a great musician, who had played organ at the age of nine in his
father’s church and wrote a biography of Bach in 1905 and published a book on
organ building and playing in 1906.
While a young man of such accomplishments
could have sat back and took in all that success as deserved, this remarkable
scholar and musician took the money he made from his speaking engagements and
concerts, and put it toward medical school, deciding that now he wanted to be a
medical missionary. By 1913, having obtained
his M.D. degree, he founded his hospital at Lambaréné in French Equatorial
Africa, where after a stint as a prisoner of war, and years of lecturing around
the world, he spent the last half of his life.
With the funds earned
from his own royalties and personal appearance fees and with those donated from
all parts of the world, he expanded the hospital to seventy buildings which by
the early 1960's could take care of over 500 patients in residence at any one
time.
I almost hesitate to
bring up someone like Albert Schweitzer in a sermon, because he seems so
incredible as to be perfect. We hear about him and think, what a guy, but
that’s not me. But may I suggest that there’s a little of him in all people of
faith?
You see, he took the
fruits of his success, the financial rewards of his work, as you take the
fruits of your success, and rather than keep them for himself, he offered them
up for the ministry.
And like you, he didn’t
just take his money and give it to the first person who needed it. He invested
in institutions, from the hospital to the church, knowing that it is through
institutions that we do more than put a band aid on the problem. Through our
institutions, we invest in carrying on the work from generation to generation.
For example, a hospital
can become more than just an emergency room to treat the sick. It can also be a
place of learning for cures for diseases and treatments as yet unimagined.
Similarly, the church is
an institution that seeks to do more than meet the needs of people already in
the room. The church has always relied upon the gifts of people of vision, who
want to leave a legacy that will train up the children of the future in the
values we hold dear in this present.
And when we make that
investment, not for ourselves, but for an institution that we pray will outlast
us, we are saying thank you, for all we have received. We’re being like the
tenth leper, who turns back and says thank you.
In 1953, Schweitzer
received the Nobel Peace Prize. With the
$33,000 prize money, he started the leprosarium at Lambaréné, a sanctuary for
people with leprosy, which was then still as feared a disease as it was in
Jesus’ day.
Today, leprosy is
treatable, thanks to the work of those medical missionaries who risked their
own well being to care for others and learned the key to treatment. And today,
we always associate Schweitzer with that disease, and his commitment to those
who suffered with it. His commitment was to the people but let’s be bold and
let’s be clear, his treasure served to build the institutions that became part
of healing and learning on a much bigger scale.
Schweitzer was somebody
who inspired the gratitude of patients and of the world, but he thought about
gratitude himself quite a bit, and was grateful to those who gave him the
strength to do his work of service.
While we think of him as
someone who others would thank, he gave thanks himself, saying, “At times our own light goes out and is
rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with
deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”
The tenth leper knew what the other
nine didn’t. It’s never too late to say thank you. But the nine lepers went
back and gave thanks at the temple. I like to think they re-entered society and
became leaders within their faith. And it is the legacy of the Jewish temples
that continues in Christian churches today. All ten lepers said thank you in
their way. None perfectly, but their sparks live on, one generation to the
other, reminding us that it’s never too late to say thank you. Amen.